“Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in”, William S. Burroughs, Dead City Radio, Ah Pook.
I’ve been thinking for a while now about this phrase “death needs time for what it kills to grow in” trying to figure it out. Interpretation-wise, this is a dangerous game, as Burroughs is known for using cut & paste techniques, trying to destroy any rational thought. And yet, from a modern perspective, the potential randomness behind the order of the words shouldn’t and even must not persuade us in the futility of giving it a sense. After all, that’s exactly what life is – random events to which we try to give some meaning.
Time
There are several possible viewpoints about Time: Time as a continuity and unity; Time as a collection of independent Time Capsules, a label aggregating all those capsules together.
Time as a continuity and unity allows for better Control - there’s time to order things in Space. It may also lead to either an indifferent position in the spirit of what has been will be again, or to a satisfied one, in the spirit of the problem is solved; there’s nothing more that can be done.
Time as a fragment of Time, as an endless recursive fractal, is what I read in Foucault’s Modernism, which prefers seeing Time in its particularity, in its decomposition. A Time Capsule: just born, already dead.
The Time Capsule
What’s inside the Time Capsule?
Everything, I suppose. I’m thinking of any Time Capsule as a cosmic Monad where the fight takes place, where a human tries to redefine… Space. Modernism tries to redefine Space within a single, ephemeral, insignificant, derisory Time Capsule. And Space is us. And so Deleuze can righteously call Foucault “the historian of the present”, for there’s an Entire Life inside the Time Capsule.
Or am I wrong? Maybe it’s not Life inside the Time Capsule, but rather…
Death?
See my previous post on the death of Baudrillard, where I quote Deleuze from his lecture on Leibniz and the nature of the Monad (I’m rephrasing [remixing] everything):
To be born is to start dying.
To live is to be dying.
To die is to complete living.
And so to die is to complete to be dying.
Again:
Birth=to start dying;
Life=to be dying;
Death=to finish being dying.
Our mission here, in this Space, is to die.
But, wait! Beware! all this happens inside a single Time Capsule. Don’t get depressed – you’ll be restarting the whole process of dying in just about a moment.
Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in. Death grows inside the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule is the container of Life. Death grows in Life.
March 10, 2007 at 7:03 pm |
[...] One of my favourite pieces by Burroughs is the short Ah Pook discussion of time, death, control and the ‘ugly american’. I showed it to my Introduction to Philosophy class this week, at the start of the lecture, then came across it again [...]
March 15, 2007 at 8:21 pm |
“A sword with a clock in the side. A nudist party.” Burroughs, “My Education: A Book of Dreams
“The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only one loves differently. It is the love for a woman that causes doubt in us… Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and ‘know’ everything.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Muli, I like this time capsule idea. I think of it, not only as an actual time capsule one buries in the ground for excavation by future generations a la Foucault, but also as a drug capsule, a capsule to swallow, that intoxicates.
I remember Burroughs saying he could stare at the end of his shoe for hours on end when he was high on junk. Time was never a problem – it was kind of buried. This was a fundamental tenet of his “theory” of control and what the metaphor of junk serves for in the life the ugly american leads, the lives we all lead. (I put “theory” in inverted commas because I’m uncertain whether or not I could call his thought put into words anything as “rational” as a theory “to understand and ‘know’ everything – as you say, interpretation is dangerous)
There is no death for the life of the junky – at least as I understand death as opposed to life for I do not call heroin addiction living in the active sense of the word. Only the hourglass of junk, junk time, the “Algebra of Need”: “Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of Time.”
Issues of control, measurement and need, ends and means. “Death needs Time for what it kills to grow in.” Formula for Bergson’s “Creative Evolution. Since the ancient Greeks, authenticity and death have been closely linked – hell, even the ancient Egyptians and probably since the conceotion of the first word-gesture.
Life is an active principle. One has to take a chance, to risk death which means we have to (re-)invent ourselves, to create a memory for ourselves for that is what a culture is, to encapsulate a set of values over time, over generations, beyond any one’s given death.
(And should we make a gift of death? in writing and interpreting there is hazard, a death, the death of the author, as Barthes called it – and what will become of the Word? Will the author make it through the Land of the Dead? Will Baudrillard be remembered in a hundred years? Will Foucault? Will we?).
By the way, thanks for the Burroughs clip. Very cool.
March 27, 2007 at 5:21 pm |
Thank you Ecko for this wonderful comment.
July 27, 2007 at 2:33 am |
[...] Everybody dies alone. Everybody wants to live forever. Plato for Prozac – a time capsule. [...]